Coordinating a poetry collection with multiple authors
Posted: July 9th, 2018, 5:35 pm
So I'm currently thinking about coordinating James Weldon Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry as a group project. It seems like it should be a relatively easy project to put together, but I do have a couple of weird questions that are particular to this book. I might need an MC to weigh in on some of these.
1) The preface is a major problem. It’s unbelievably long—almost 11,000 words—and will probably have to be split up into 2-3 separate sections. However, I've never seen a book on Librivox where the preface (usually denoted as "00" in the filenames) was broken up into multiple recordings. Is this acceptable? Or should I just try to find some particularly masochistic volunteer willing to record all 11,000+ words of the preface?
2) The book is organized into 31 chapters, each spotlighting a different author. Some chapters (like the one on Claude McKay) are pretty long (can't blame them—he's a great poet!). Others are really short, with only one or two poems. Should I allow volunteers to select different sections based on individual poems? Or would it be a better idea to maintain the author-centric chapter breaks and have volunteers claim an entire block of poems (regardless of whether it's one of the larger or smaller sections)?
Sorry if these are dumb questions. I've never put together a poetry collection before.
1) The preface is a major problem. It’s unbelievably long—almost 11,000 words—and will probably have to be split up into 2-3 separate sections. However, I've never seen a book on Librivox where the preface (usually denoted as "00" in the filenames) was broken up into multiple recordings. Is this acceptable? Or should I just try to find some particularly masochistic volunteer willing to record all 11,000+ words of the preface?
2) The book is organized into 31 chapters, each spotlighting a different author. Some chapters (like the one on Claude McKay) are pretty long (can't blame them—he's a great poet!). Others are really short, with only one or two poems. Should I allow volunteers to select different sections based on individual poems? Or would it be a better idea to maintain the author-centric chapter breaks and have volunteers claim an entire block of poems (regardless of whether it's one of the larger or smaller sections)?
Sorry if these are dumb questions. I've never put together a poetry collection before.